I’d go to Aftabgardan in its chic new uptown building in the morning and attend classes at Azad Islamic University’s College of Political Science in the afternoon. My classes were full of students who’d been accepted to the university without taking entrance exams as part of the television station Seda va Sima’s allotment. Some were known TV personalities, news announcers, or sports commentators. A woman named Faezeh Bahremani, a visiting student from our school’s Karaj campus, caught my attention. She’d show up in a white Renault, then fold up her chador and drape it over the back of her chair before the class started. I liked her attitude—none of the other girls dared remove their chadors in class, even though it wasn’t mandatory to wear one.
There wasn’t enough space for the university to place men and women in separate classes, so the rooms were segregated down the middle, the ladies seated on the right and the gentlemen on the left. Even when the women’s side was overflowing and the men’s side had empty chairs, we would squeeze in uncomfortably to avoid any unnecessary interaction with the opposite sex. Even the stairways were segregated and patrolled by Disciplinary Committee spies. If for some reason you needed to talk to someone across the divide in class, you always spoke loudly and obviously so everyone witnessed your innocent request to borrow a book or swap notes. We could be dismissed from our studies at any moment if the Disciplinary Committee reported misbehavior. In this atmosphere, Faezeh’s actions struck me as brave.
Faezeh often borrowed my notes when she couldn’t come to class. However, I still didn’t realize who she was until another girl in class told me. I promptly spread the rumor. “Did you know that she’s the daughter of President Hashemi Rafsanjani?” I whispered to my friends from Seda va Sima. “That’s the president’s daughter.” They looked at her in disbelief. That she would be in our school wasn’t all that significant, but her behavior certainly was. Her father had been Khomeini’s close associate, and here she threw off her chador. We expected the president’s daughter to cover herself up to her eyes like the other revolutionaries. I was amazed when I’d see her drive to school wearing only a scarf, putting on her full chador in her parked car to walk up to the school. “Go tell her to show you her identity card,” someone said to me.
“Excuse me, Faezeh?” She lifted her head from her notes.
“Yes?”
“Could I see your identity card for a second?” I asked in a bold voice. “They don’t believe that you’re Faezeh.” I knew I was being rude, but I wanted to prove how relaxed I could be with the president’s daughter. By using Bahremani as her last name, the part of her full family name her father didn’t use publicly, she had a little protection from scrutiny. Now I was being nosy and exposing my friend to gain popularity points.
Without saying anything, she reached into her bag and handed me her card, where it was plainly written, “Faezeh Hashemi Bahremani.”
After a few months I began to feel that Aftabgardan was also too small for me. Just downstairs from us were the offices of Hamshahri, and I dreamed about a move from the fifth floor to the fourth. My editor complained that my articles were too heavy for young readers, like the one I wrote about the basement of Rudaki’s hall, and how the fancy decorations from the famous celebration of twenty-five hundred years of the monarchy were gathering dust, forgotten, the elaborate parade costumes buried many layers deep under the stage. She felt the piece was too complicated and had nothing to do with children. But I didn’t want to write for children any more. I wanted to go to press conferences at important ministries and write on political and social issues. For me, reporting for teens was supposed to be a stepping-stone, one I could leap over. But at Aftabgardan I was still being asked to know my place and keep it.
So I got up the courage and submitted a story to the editor of the society desk at Hamshahri, Fariborz Bayat. The piece was about a couple with fertility problems, and I discussed what different hospitals offered and what Islam says about pregnancy. He accepted me as a member of his staff—all it took was a change to my identification card, and I was finally a grown-up reporter working for the most prestigious paper in Iran. I could go to work in my emerald-colored manto and sit with mature intellectuals like Asef Nakhai and Yousef Bani Tourof and Iranzad and talk about democracy and reform. How lovely it was!
“Maman, yallah! Honk the horn! Yallah—honk the horn!”
The giddy sound filled Khiaban-e Mir Damad. My mother played along with the reassuring reply, “Honk! Honnnk! Honk!” Kai Khosrou leaned out the front window and I out the back, and we screamed, “Khatami! Khatami!” We had plastered the whole car, even the back windshield, with pictures of the presidential candidate.
Tehran was turned upside down with excitement. Khatami was the favorite candidate, and the State-supported Nateq Nuri was despised. “Don’t tear yourselves to pieces! It’ll be fixed, and all of a sudden Nateq will be president,” a passerby shouted at us. High school-aged boys zealously tossed flyers. “For the sake of democracy, for the sake of freedom, vote for Khatami!” We were surrounded by fashionably dressed teens—the generation that was supposed to carry on the revolution but didn’t. They were us. They were me. We who listened to pop music at home and danced at parties. We who had been brought before the Komité on meaningless charges, had been kicked or detained in cowardly raids on their homes, had been flogged and made to pay fines without justification. Deep inside, we hated the government and the system, and today we were baring that truth and our hope for peaceful, civilized reforms. With our votes, we were demanding human rights and social justice.
“Iran for all Iranians!” Khatami had made this his rallying cry. I knew what this statement meant for me. I, who was considered a second-class citizen, who was scorned and despised in the Ayatollah’s society. Oh, I had such hope in my heart! In this unprecedented campaign the people were joyfully unified for the first time since the revolution. The fear was that if Nateq Nuri won, thugs and extremists would wreck havoc and destruction on the people, and Iran’s global standing would be in serious jeopardy. Khatami’s spoke eloquently of the suffering and disillusionment that we, the millions of young people of Iran, had born. If victorious, he could be our angel of deliverance.
“Maman, there’s a Khatami campaign booth. Hold on a second, and we’ll get more posters. Otherwise, we’ll run out by this evening.” When we tucked the piles of posters under our arms and hurried back, my mother wasn’t there! Had it not been a legal parking spot? We searched high and low. Had she gotten tired of waiting and left?
A boy who was passing out flyers asked me, “Are you looking for the blue Renault with a lady driving?” I nodded my head. He said, “The Komité picked her up and took her toward the station.”
My jaw dropped. My mother wasn’t wearing makeup, and she wasn’t improperly covered. But all the armed forces and Basijis, or perhaps it would be better to say all the Hezbollahis, had been mobilized to prohibit propaganda. This hard-line reaction only helped people to view the election as a referendum where Khatami’s victory would represent a big “no” to the Islamic Republic. Kai Khosrou and I were worriedly conferring when we saw the familiar blue car turn the corner. It had been cleaned of any trace of campaign posters. My mother sat behind the wheel steaming with rage.
“Maman, where did you go?”
“Just shut up! Both of you. You and your Agha-ye Khatami! Snake venom on your propaganda! The Komité pulled me over and said, ‘What is this? Is this a car or a campaign booth on wheels?’ And they said putting up photos is illegal.” The Komité had threatened to hold my mother and send her down to the central station, but she pleaded with them, explaining that her election-crazed children had decorated her car. And with no kids around to grab by the ear, what were they going to do with this dignified middle-aged woman?
A couple of days later, my sister and mother pulled up at the intersection of Suhravardi and Motahari. It was after eleven, and I was standing holding a billboard of Khatami that was taller than I was. My gang of boys was
tossing flyers into cars as they stopped at the intersection. I had gathered a team between the ages of ten and thirteen. With only forty-eight hours left until the elections, my family was having a party for my sister’s wedding anniversary, and her house was ideally situated near Khatami’s campaign headquarters. So I had taken advantage of this opportunity to bring Kai Khosrou and a bunch of my other relatives out into the streets. We had until midnight to campaign. No one in my family, including me, would vote two days later. To vote would be to support the system and the constitution of the Islamic Republic, and I agonized over whether to vote until it was too late. But my brother and I campaigned until we were breathless. And on election day twenty million Iranians—many of them first-time voters, many of them women—flocked to the polling booths, and Khatami won in a landslide.
I wore my hejab perfectly, but even so I’d posted two scouts at the next intersection to warn us the second they saw a Basiji patrol. When the boys hailed us, we’d collide into each other as we rushed to hide in the corner store where we’d stashed our posters and flyers. This running and hiding would recur every twenty minutes, but it was worth it. Drivers would be shocked to see a woman out this late with a giant picture of Khatami, and they’d flash their brights to be sure they were actually seeing a girl.
“Camelia, give up! Get in! Tell the boys we’re going home.” Kati was covered in makeup for her wedding anniversary and wore a blue overcoat over her evening gown. My mother had brought her in desperation to get me. It was about the fiftieth time she’d driven down, and every time I had told her, “Fifteen more minutes!” I looked at Kati. I had certainly ruffled her feathers. “We’re taking the boys!”
But my boys wouldn’t budge—they weren’t going anywhere without me. I cried, “This is an historic moment. Go ahead. I’ll come in an hour.”
This time my mother really went off. “The city is out of control! They’re going to come and arrest you for being a mujahed, and there’ll be consequences. Just like Guli. You’ll end up next to her in Behesht-e Zahra. And to hell with Khatami! How worried do I have to be?”
Guli’s story plagued me throughout my childhood and would later haunt me when I sat in prison. I would remember the wedding dress her mother hung on the wall, the dress that Guli had brought back from England but never had the chance to wear. My father told us the guards had delivered a bag with her clothes to her mother along with a Qur’an and a stick of candy. “Your daughter’s dowry,” they explained. I remembered my father’s aching, futile search to discover if Guli had been “wedded” to one of the guards before she went before the firing squad, his quest to find the morticians who washed the bodies, in case they’d agree to disclose this secret. In Islam, it is an abomination to execute a virgin.
chapter ten
A Clever Bird Caught in a Snare
FALL 1999
When we saw each other, my focused energy threaded out magically from my fingertips, drawing him into bondage. He didn’t see the fine, invisible spider web coiled around his hands and feet. But he saw my hands. After a month and a half, I could feel him turning. His interrogations were no longer motivated by whether or not I was a spy. They had become about his desire to hear my voice and see my hands.
When I heard the door of the cell block open, my heart would start to throb. The story that I had written for us started with my falling in love, falling so truly in love that it would be real to the man who was my interrogator. By the vitality of my love I’d become free. This was the story inside these cell walls, I knew, but my mind was stuck when it came to sketching out what would happen outside the prison. The first condition was that I had to be free.
They were very interested in what went on in Faezeh Hashemi’s house. They’d heard rumors about her affairs with a certain man and wanted to know all the details—how many boyfriends she had, how serious they were. They wanted to know if she prayed or not, did she screw her husband, Agha-ye Lahuti, at night or not? Were they against the velayat-e faqih or opposed to Ayatollah Khamene’i? I refused to answer for days, but then, along with everything else, I started telling them whatever they wanted to hear, from secrets I thought I’d never confess to outrageous lies to match their outrageous questions. Exhausted from the interrogations, I became confused in my own mind about what was true and what wasn’t. With my face to the wall, I told as many secrets as I could fabricate about Faezeh’s lovers. I also confessed the smallest details of my personal life, and giving these “shameful” memories over to my interrogator filled me with a strange sense of religious purity. I felt that my confessions were drawing him closer to me. I told him how bad my parents were, how irreligious, how they didn’t believe in the government. How I drank alcohol. Then, when he still wanted more, I started telling lies.
There were only two things I promised myself that I wouldn’t let escape from my lips, and I held fast to my decision. “No, I didn’t see Farah Pahlavi. It’s not true. I saw Reza Pahlavi and I interviewed him, but I did not see Farah!”
“You black devil! You’re lying!” he shouted. “Your mother admitted to us that you’d seen her. Tell me the truth!”
I told myself that they could put me through hell, bring me to the threshold of death, but no matter what, I had to resist talking about two things: Jean, an American FBI agent who was a good, loyal friend, and my meeting with the Queen. I could never convince my interrogator that these were simple, human relationships. If they knew about these meetings, the Ministry of Intelligence would hang me from a meat hook to get me to recite whatever they wanted to hear. To keep to my role, I kept telling myself that my mother and my family must have been imagining things. I went so far as to convince myself that I really had never met the Queen.
My mother and Kati later told me about their own interrogations. My mother said, “On the second day after you were taken away, the Revolutionary Court said that Katayun and I could come to see you. We were crying and feared for your safety. But you were not there. Instead they brought me into a room with two bearded men. I asked, ‘Where is Camelia? Where did you take my daughter?’
“‘Hajj Khanum, keep calm. If you don’t keep calm, your daughter is going to hell. Good, now tell us, what did Camelia tell you about her meeting with Farah Diba? She herself told us that you were overjoyed!’
“The wiry runt with his crooked mouth laughed and stood over me waiting for an answer. I said, ‘Why are you interrogating me? It’s enough that you took her away and that we don’t know what you’ve inflicted upon her. Now you come after us and lie to us and tell us that you’ve arranged for us to see her—in order to put us over the rack? My daughter is innocent. She hasn’t seen Farah. Take your questions and go ask Faezeh Hashemi, Faezeh, who says she’s responsible for Camelia’s reporting.’”
Kati told me that she heard my mother’s shouting and tried to break in, but the intelligence officers blocked the door to the room and threatened her with arrest. When my mother fainted, the men carried her out and brought a glass of sugar water from the judge’s office to revive her. Then they forced Kati with her two-and-a-half-year-old baby, Yasbanu, into the interrogation room. After seeing my mother fighting and arguing as she was dragged out, little Yasbanu started crying uncontrollably.
“Camelia confessed yesterday that she went to see Farah Pahlavi,” they told her. And in anger Kati answered, “She never said any such thing, nor have I heard any such thing. You must have beaten my poor sister for her to be confessing to lies.”
My mother told me, “That week Khamene’i led the Friday prayers, and he launched right into talking about spying and Radio Free Europe and treasonous Iranians. We went to Faezeh’s house. We told her to do something to help you, or they would kill you. And even Faezeh said that this speech was hinting at the news of your arrest.”
I’d heard about the Friday sermons from my interrogator. He told me, “We have reported to his eminence Ayatollah Khamene’i the big news about the spy we snagged, and he referred to this very thing yesterday
at Friday prayers. Oh, you’ll be in trouble if you’re not cleansed in time. Everyone is disgusted with you. They want you to die. The charges against you were published in today’s Kayhan. You don’t have any friends left.”
He wanted to crush my faith that I’d be released, but a sprig of hope was living inside of me. My father was very attached to one of Hafez’s sayings and would repeat it often. It was a line of poetry that he’d use to give you courage whenever things looked hopeless: “Morgh-e zirak chun be dam oftad, tahammol bayadash” (When a clever bird is caught in a snare, it has to be strong and wait).
If I want to do something, I find a way to do it. I wanted to get of prison, and I gave myself courage, knowing that I was going to get out.
They tried to bring me to my breaking point, to the point where nothing mattered. I was moved from the damp room to a dry cell, but the same powerful light was on twenty-four hours a day. The same coarse carpet covered the floor. I had a plastic cup for drinking water and a copper plate and bowl for food. The bath schedule was once a week on Sundays, and once a week we had cleaning duty. One week we’d clean the baths and the toilets and the following week we’d sweep and mop the corridor and the space in front of the cells. On one of the Fridays when it was my turn for cleaning duty, I was listening to the sound of the guards’ radio as I swept the corridor. The guest on the show was someone I knew, Afshin Aala, an author and poet who wrote for children and young adults. He started reciting a poem.
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